Characterizing Distributed Mobile Augmented Reality Applications at the Edge

Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) is gaining traction as a compelling application due to recent advancements in hardware and software. Previous studies have suggested that distributing AR services on an edge computing infrastructure can offer significant performance benefits, especially for consolidating concurrent clients. In this study, we shed light on several research challenges directly impacting the effective integration of distributed AR and edge computing. Specifically, we conduct extensive experiments by deploying our distributed stream processing-based AR pipeline, scAtteR, on a representative edge-cloud infrastructure managed by the Oakestra framework. We uncover several unapparent challenges that inhibit the effective marriage of distributed AR when deployed on edge and demonstrate the potential improvements through scAtteR++. We offer valuable insights and best practices to the growing AR research community, specifically those interested in leveraging edge and public cloud technologies for large-scale AR operations.